Congratulations, science! Nuclear fusion has always had an issue managing to create more energy than was put into it. You need to compress two lighter nuclei into one heavy nucleus, a change in mass that creates a lot of energy, but requires a lot of energy to make happen. But the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in the US has managed to compress hydrogen to the point of nuclear fusion at 3.3 million Kelvin (5.9 million degrees Fahrenheit). And for the first time, the energy released in the reaction exceeded the amount of fuel that went into powering the world’s most powerful laser rig and its 192 beams. Read more…

Having been a child of the 70s I witnessed what America looks like during an energy crisis and it wasn’t pretty. And many of the alternate energy sources like solar that I heard about back then are coming back into the popular conscience. But all these years later nuclear fusion still seems like science fiction. In this video physicist Steven Cowley does his pitch for why he thinks fusion will work. There are too many arguments as to why fusion would be great, so my hopes are that this power stuff becomes a reality.